Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature gained the writer increasing acclaim as a distinctive stylist but very meager financial rewards. When McCarthy, almost in a gesture of desperation, acquired an agent and a new publisher, both of whom encouraged McCarthy to alter both his style and his Southern settings (essentially extending the Western backdrop of Just how mercenary conglomerate fiction has become is made clear not just in Sinykin’s book but also very plainly in a that closely examines the court proceedings in the antitrust case brought ag ..read more

as a webpage, and on its own website. More to come ..read more

The newest issue (issue 6) of my Substack book review, , is now available. This issue focuses on several books published by Corona/Samizdat Press.  ..read more

is not likely to have much effect in bringing about such changes in the curriculum and objectives of academic literary study. For one thing, the book itself is short on practical, concrete suggestions for bringing them about. Most of its analysis is historical and diagnostic, providing a general critique of the current status of literature and literary criticism in the academic curriculum, providing lots of clarity about how the "profession" of literary study came into its present form but otherwise remaining content with vague exhortations about what "must" happen if it is to flourish in the ..read more

A new issue of Unbeaten Paths is ..read more

A new issue of Unbeaten Paths is ..read more

This establishment is the logical outcome of what is now decades in which general-interest literary critics have been replaced by other writers of fiction as the go-to authors of book reviews, while fewer and fewer academic critics have been willing (or able) to cross over into general-interest criticism. At the same time, the critical tenor deemed acceptable in book reviews of fiction has followed the culture in becoming literally less judgmental--when fiction is regarded primarily as a form of "expression," who's to say when someone else's expression is flawed? But judgment is not simply (or ..read more

I have made available a collection of my essays and reviews focused on experimental fiction. It can be found ..read more

If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literar ..read more